Xmms sounds "electronic"

Message

5xl · Post by **5xl** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 2:49 am

All of my MP3's that usually play fine in Windows XP sound like they have a really really low bit rate. Even nice ogg and VBR files sound crappy. I see in the main xmms window that the mp3s are playing at the normal bit rate and at 44 KHz. I have googled for about a week and searched this board but I can't find anyone with a sound problem like this. I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe MoBo with onboard NForce 3 sound. A problem with ALSA? Any suggestions?

smasher · Post by **smasher** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 4:30 am

Which driver are you using? Nvidia has an nforce driver but it's oss only. The alsa i810 audio driver worked fine me when I use a A7N8X Deluxe board though it doesn't support hardware mixing. You may want to use alsamixer, kamix, or kmix and play around with your levels. I have found some mixer levels will distort the sound. If I remember correctly the default rate should be 48000 not 44100. Hope this helps.

Cintra · Post by **Cintra** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 6:31 am

try 'iecset rate 44100'
mvh

5xl · Post by **5xl** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 8:37 pm

I am using alsa and I am using the nforce drivers that I emerged from gentoo. (stable one) However I do use the OSS emulation built into my kernel. When I use the gnome alsa mixer I see two tabs, one says NVidia nForce 2 [alsa mixer] and the other says Realtek ALC650F [OSS Mixer]. I have tried using both plugins with xmms with the same results. I usually use esound though, so I can get many sounds at once. Could the issue be with esd? I tried playing with the iecset settings but I haven't noticed a difference. Are they supposed to work in realtime? I have the xmms equalizer turned on and it works but the sound is not distorted. It just plain sounds like it was made by a techno group in the 80's. What exactly does iecset do? Does it interface with the driver or alsa or the hardware itself? What else can I try?

martin.k · Post by **martin.k** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 9:46 pm

This metallic sound of your mp3 and ogg files maight be caused by CFLAGS option

Code: Select all

-mfpmath=sse

You should check your make.conf. AMD Athlon XP is not so good in sse floating point math. The newer samples with sse3 support are known to work with -mfpmath correctly. You may try this -mfpmath=sse,387.

5xl · Post by **5xl** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 1:01 am

I don't use that CFLAGS option. Just -03 and my arch. Eminem sounds like Mr Roboto.

Cintra · Post by **Cintra** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 5:02 am

Hei again
Ref iecset, yes it should work straight away. Did you also try 'iecset rate 48000'?
In my case with an on-board intel8x0, using 48000 makes spdif sound 'tinny'.
mvh

Porg · Post by **Porg** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 9:13 pm

I've the same problem with my A7N8X.. the sound is very strange...
I've changed the PCM volume in alsamixer to ~70, now it sounds much better but although not as good as it should.

iecset rate 48000 doesn't really help.

Cintra · Post by **Cintra** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 4:53 am

No, I would expect it to cause the tinniness